One-week "Resistance Penalty Testing" Hardcore Ladder Race

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grindis123 wrote:

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Exmorda wrote:

Oh shit, I had global off and did not notice, RIP lolmaul =(

Yep i just crashed and got killed by 1 extra cold dmg mob in a map. My broken graphics card cause me system lock ups often so its a huge gamble for me =). Didn't get lucky in this race. Good luck for everyone still racing!

Nooo, that sucked mate! :( RIP!

PS. Gonna miss your maps ;)

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Balron wrote:

So you don't think there is anything wrong with the whole 'GS Marauder situation'? Interesting.

GS mara is somewhat "safe" despite being melee. He's simply saying that minion witch is safer.

Anyone know what the top witches are doing? Ice or summon..?

3 summon 1 unknown.

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Balron wrote:

So you don't think there is anything wrong with the whole 'GS Marauder situation'? Interesting.

And where exactly did I say that? Just thought it was funny to see people constantly whine about GS while Minions barely get mentioned even though they are just as good.

GS is safe because it's semi-ranged, Minion spam is safe because you're barely getting touched. Both are either too good because they are extremely low risk/high reward (Minions even more so than GS, although GS is considerably faster) or other skills are simply not good enough and need to be buffed. A very delicate matter and I hope GGG will manage to strike a good balance here and not just nerf both things into the ground, even though I couldn't care less if Minion spam gets hit hard. I think it's boring and makes grouping intolerable but if people like to play that way so be it, more power to them I guess.

I'm quite fond of GS with Ranger, I find it to be very sexy, as her voice echoes, so does her slams.


ATM, racing with Mrs. Kitten Mittenz, second race for her and I happened to have picked up yet another dropped temp chainz so I'll be staying till the end with her I hope.

Made it to ruthless oversoul before dying to fire punch - not unexpected because it's laggy for me in there, my last hardcore character also died to ruthless oversoul. But could have been avoided if I was more alert/patient.

But regarding resistances, which is the purpose of the test, didn't notice much difference to the old way. I still prioritised resist and life on gear, but ended up with lower resists overall. Monsters were nerfed though, so the end result wasn't all that different. I had generally bad drops, at level 45 I'd found a grand total of 1 orb of alchemy, and no chaos, although I did find one more alch and one chaos shortly before death. I guess the real question is how things pan out in merciless, but I didn't make it that far so can't really comment, although the way things were going I think I would have eventually maxed resists or come close to max, and the game would have been easier than before the change.
Barring that, I probably would just end up engaging in gear swapping when appropriate. For the bandits I took 1 skill point, and helped kraityn twice. Didn't take any resists from the passive tree.

I have just died to merciless Vaal at 61, lazer & rock combo as usual, I had 80% fire resist and 80% lighting resist, some armor too when fighting him. Not sure if I would do better if I focused on the other defenses instead of resists. For some reason I feel more relieved than sad because of this loss. Usually I don't feel this way when losing a character in hardcore races.

About penalties in general
I'm afraid my opinion haven't changed while playing this league, it is not bringing anything new, just setting the resist priority on gear a lot higher. Overall bad change; less choices to be made about gear, more hassle with switching gear for certain resists, bad passive tree implementation. Basically it only amplified the fundamental trouble with percent based defense like this.

About resistance flasks
They still suck. You don't want them, it is simply 100% better to cap resists. And in combat the required timing and number of uses... can't compete at all. Simply delete them from the game. I'm talking about Ruby, Topaz and Sapphire flask here, xyz flasks of resistances can still be very helpful.

About endurance charges
Nothing changes, they are good and useful. Still you will rather cap the resists with gear if you can than with active skill like this for obvious reasons. But they do have a bit more use since it is harder to get to cap, especially while leveling and switching gear which can cost you some resistance. But I used enduring cry this way before as well.

About passive resistance skills
Imbalance between classes is obvious. The classes with access to endurance charges bonuses have also access to good resistance skills. Witch has the walkers and dexterity part of tree has the status ailment avoid. Well, I will always cap resists first before I think about ailments since resists mitigate their effects as well.
The generic resistance nodes are a bad design in general. It doesn't let you specialize, it only makes you sink a point in it (and then respec that point once you perfect your gear). Resistances are good for everyone, everyone needs them, it doesn't distinguish builds at all. The only well designed* nodes are those that adjust the function of resists somehow (raise cap, status ailments, chaos resist).
*within the percentage system

About gear resistance mods
More hassle and you find less viable gear pieces now. More rings to keep in inventory, more space in stash taken.

About chambers of sin
Fidelitas (the boss, I'm not sure about the spelling) in ruthless felt OP. Maxed lighting resist of course but still... Merciless was a lot easier.

About groundslam style
I never liked this skill because I prefer more 'contact' melee style but everybody is talking about how OP it is etc. so I tried it again. It really is very powerful. Stun and the range while the width is good as well. You don't get hit much compared to sweep or cleave either. I think good tweak would be shrinking the width of AoE or even adjust the shape of it from V to ().



TL;DR The negative effects overshadow the positive ones.

Im still working on my post but i want to chime in on something. Looking at the ladder tells you nothing about Groundslam. In fact it's obvious to me that Groundslam is basically the only talent anyone should use to say level 20, and from 40 or so and beyond its power begins to seriously wane ( it's just ahead enough that it is not apparent for some time).

Literally any build out there is easier to manage with Lag, has better oh shit defense, and can at times be near immortal in comparison to 2h Groundslam.

The gear on my main is pretty unreal at this point, besides a 425-475 karui maul with ias I would say I have 40% "perfect" gear for whatever that is worth in a game with rare items like this, and in a level 63 map I could die in 2-3 bad seconds at level 78. I have 4500 health and 80 DR and max resists. Kotao who I've run about 200 maps with at this point in both week races and on mains, his main caster might as well be Superman. I've seen him desync in a huge pack and lose 4k of energy shield.... Of his 13000.

Far too often people think marauders=Groundslam and are so good, but they have the best tree/opening tree(in my opinion) and that's it.

If anything Groundslam is far too strong early and more or less is the worst "end game worthy" aoe by level 60. Marauders can just level 2x as fast for levels 15-40 so people think that's Groundslam. So people look up and see all these high ranked marauders so fast ( I hit 57 with 22 hours played) and well it must be too strong, it's Groundslam.

It'll be a shame if Groundslam gets nerfed purely because of thread whining because of the 3 types of classes I've played to a high level, the least safe or easiest to play is my GS Melee.


For the last two races, every single high ranking marauder has died, or if they won they died once earlier in the week. Oh you're telling me the most gear intensive spec is easier the second time through with gear stored?

I'm never a fan of nerfing something that works. If GS had the range of LS with it's current dmg, ya that would be OP but it really isn't. I think the reason everyone goes with GS is because cleave and sweep aren't nearly as good.

With how close you have to get for those two skills it makes no sense that GS does generally more dmg. On my templar I have the 12% increase to AOE and GS covers ALOT of ground. I noticed with staffs sweep is pretty wide but to hit a large group you need to be in the middle meaning you'll need much higher DR than a GS melee would.

Rather than calling to nerf GS, how about improving either the AOE are of cleave/sweep or their damage. Cleave being 70% and GS being (pre-patch) 88% made no sense to me (I think it's 88% right?)

feedback on resist penalty

With the resist penalty a draw back I'm quickly noticing is because I need dual resist/life on almost every piece of gear (gs templar) my DR is awful. It took me until lvl 53 to find a 4l chest and all it has going for it is 900 def. I have an astral plate I'm trying to roll but after a few chaos orbs I realized I'm trying to get triple resist, life and double armor mods.

I have 82 AR right now so I go into areas hoping for elemental damage. I'm scared when I see large groups of bandits or bears because I know the massive amount of physical damage is going to be hard to mitigate.

I'm starting to think it's better to have resist with diminishing returns the same way armor works. Rather than having a flat 15-18% node to pick up, you get a 30% to AR or a certain resist. I can speak for duelist, with the 3 armor/eva nodes it becomes a pretty big boost so I feel I can avoid the 10% ones. With 150% resist to fill you have no option but grab every resist node until you get perfect gear.

maps

I hate to add to the noise but I got into act 2 merci at lvl 48 and I'm now lvl 67 close to 68 and I have found 3 maps. I've made some friends within the top 10 that have been kind enough to let me run a few maps with them (or greedy using me to get the exp bonus) but I tend to play different hours than them so I can't depend on them. Also, if I didn't get onto mumble I'd probably be flying completely solo here having only been able to run 3 maps.

I think people are right with the vendor idea. Sell maps for an alch from the vendors. Now that there are so many more item names it's really hard to find matches and costing an alch means people won't be able to buy in bulk (at least for races) to make high lvl maps.

As of right now if I don't start finding maps I'm stopping at 70 (or dying before then). There's just no point of trying to do enough fellshrines to keep up with people even doing just lvl 60 maps.

Also, one of the guys told me that as you get higher in level the chances of maps dropping on lower lvl areas (like fellshrine and pyramid, the places I'm running for hours) get lower. This makes no sense, I think it should be the opposite. If a lvl 75+ is running fellshrine he shouldn't have a lower chance to get a map than a lvl 54.

The high lvl person obviously got screwed by RNG and it's not like lvl 60 maps are a big help (but it's much better than running the pyramid for days). I think I figured out on default that it would take over 20 lvl 60 maps to get to get from 76 to 77.

Sorry for the wall of text. I thought it would be a short reply about GS but I'm getting annoyed doing auto-pilot fellshrine runs.

edit: oh, have found 9-10 chisels already. If the map drop rate was half of the chisel drop rate I think it would be wonderful.